SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

The diagnostics Pragma

This module extends the terse diagnostics normally emitted by both the perl compiler and the perl interpeter, augmenting them with the more explicative and endearing descriptions found in perldiag. Like the other pragmata, it affects the compilation phase of your program rather than merely the execution phase.

To use in your program as a pragma, merely invoke

use diagnostics;

at the start (or near the start) of your program. (Note that this does enable perl's -w flag.) Your whole compilation will then be subject(ed :-) to the enhanced diagnostics. These still go out STDERR.

Due to the interaction between runtime and compiletime issues, and because it's probably not a very good idea anyway, you may not use no diagnostics to turn them off at compiletime. However, you may control there behaviour at runtime using the disable() and enable() methods to turn them off and on respectively.

The -verbose flag first prints out the perldiag introduction before any other diagnostics. The $diagnostics::PRETTY variable can generate nicer escape sequences for pagers.

The splain Program

While apparently a whole nuther program, splain is actually nothing more than a link to the (executable) diagnostics.pm module, as well as a link to the diagnostics.pod documentation. The -v flag is like the use diagnostics -verbose directive. The -p flag is like the $diagnostics::PRETTY variable. Since you're post-processing with splain, there's no sense in being able to enable() or disable() processing.

Output from splain is directed to STDOUT, unlike the pragma.

EXAMPLES

The following file is certain to trigger a few errors at both runtime and compiletime:

INTERNALS

Diagnostic messages derive from the perldiag.pod file when available at runtime. Otherwise, they may be embedded in the file itself when the splain package is built. See the Makefile for details.

If an extant $SIG{__WARN__} handler is discovered, it will continue to be honored, but only after the diagnostics::splainthis() function (the module's $SIG{__WARN__} interceptor) has had its way with your warnings.

There is a $diagnostics::DEBUG variable you may set if you're desperately curious what sorts of things are being intercepted.

BEGIN { $diagnostics::DEBUG = 1 }

BUGS

Not being able to say "no diagnostics" is annoying, but may not be insurmountable.

The -pretty directive is called too late to affect matters. You have to do this instead, and before you load the module.

BEGIN { $diagnostics::PRETTY = 1 }

I could start up faster by delaying compilation until it should be needed, but this gets a "panic: top_level" when using the pragma form in Perl 5.001e.

While it's true that this documentation is somewhat subserious, if you use a program named splain, you should expect a bit of whimsy.